Thursday, September 30, 2004

Access-SF, the public access TV station in SF, hosts many interesting programs, ranging from special interest programming to the educational to the community-driven. The schedule is here. Public access media gives content creators the opportunity to reach an audience without the huge hurdles involved in standard media (including PBS). As a community resource with limited resources, it is an interesting challenge to effectively market a public "good."

One show oddly struck my interest, kittypr0n, which started in SF & has spread to Portland. Non-SF residents can purchase older volumes at a nominal price of $5 per volume. I'll let the producers speak for themselves (from their blog):

Accept no corporate-sponsored substitutions. Tonight at half past midnight on San Francisco channel 29, it's a new episode of the original kittypr0n. Watch for a rare appearance by actual kittens, set to the echoey sounds of BART, by Brett Lunceford's ambient project Goose. All this with no commercials, and the brand names digitally removed in post-production. (Well, no commercials, anyway.)

And, yes, we've heard about Meow TV. What can I say? Except on the most superficial level, it doesn't sound like our show. Among other things, the other show claims to be "for" cats--a somewhat stupid idea, given your average cat's attention span--while kittypr0n is for people who like watching cats. (And, yes, cats have been known to watch kittypr0n, but it's still not *for*

them. Some cats watch their shadows on the wall, too.) You will also never see "cat haiku" or a cat surfing on our show. Perhaps most importantly, according to the AP story, Meow TV "was developed after research showed that one-third of cats enjoy watching television." kittypr0n, on the other hand, was developed after watching public access while stoned. You do the math.